The authorities in Seattle are embarrassed, and rightly so. Their cack-handed failure to maintain order during the World Trade Organisation's ministerial meeting has been televised around the world. The images are reminiscent of the grand old days of anti-Vietnam protest: cops in Darth Vader outfits, clouds of tear gas, shattered windows, chanting demonstrators.

As usual, the mayhem is being blamed on a handful of militants. If that is so, it makes the incompetence of the police even more startling. But it misses the point. No doubt the looting and destruction in Seattle was indeed the work of a small minority among the teeming mass of demonstrators, just as the ugly violence on the fringe of the tiny Euston demonstration in London was the work of rent-a-crowd yobs. Deplorable, certainly, but irrelevant. What is much more germane is the motivation of all those tens of thousands who turned out in Seattle to express their misgivings, their criticism or their rage.

The WTO is, God knows, an amorphous sort of target for popular protest. It moulds the destinies of most human beings, but the vast majority of them have never heard of it. It is unelected, non-accountable, and all but invisible except during jamborees like the Seattle meeting. It deals in the minutest detail of global commerce. Its officials - for let us be frank, ministers and even heads of government are of little account - inhabit this murky world of endless regulation. They dwell in paper mountains, and revel in schedules and annexes and exemptions. There is, of a certainty, someone in Seattle today who knows exactly how many cuckoo clocks Switzerland may export to Paraguay this year, and on what terms.

Yet there is nothing quaint or gigglesome about the process. Like its lumbering predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the WTO is founded on the false premise of free trade. False, because trade has never been less free. It is distorted by levies and subsidies, by politically motivated embargoes and boycotts, and most of all by the immense power of multinational corporations.

The likes of Microsoft, Monsanto and the emerging telecoms cartels have long since shrugged off the feeble regulatory authority of national governments. Now they are fixing the "free" global market through the WTO, the bedrock philosophy of which is that big is beautiful.

That is the common thread of complaint from the Seattle protesters. Whether they are hardline anarchists or confused bunny-huggers, they sense that the world and its trading arrangements are no longer subject to conventional political control. Around the world, elected governments are meekly knuckling under to the new capitalist order. They are handing over government itself to the private sector. The governed, meanwhile, are doing what they always do when they are denied democratic choice and representation: they are taking to the streets.

Percy, an Amazonian green parrot, has been given the bird by panto organisers in Blandford, Dorset. During rehearsals for their forthcoming production of Pirates on Treasure Island, he was required to squawk "Pieces of eight!" as all good piratical parrots do. Instead, Percy ad libbed; "Piss off mate!" he shrieked, then chanted "Bugger off! Bugger off!"

His subsequent language was even more seafaring in nature, causing the rehearsal to collapse in a howling heap. Alas, the mirth will not be shared by a wider public.

For Percy's stage career has, as it were, fallen off its perch. The family audiences of Blandford, in the opinion of the Jake's Ladder Theatre Company, are not yet ready for his post-modern interpretation of the role. This seems a shame, for Percy clearly has an instinctive grasp of buccaneering stunts. Though whether he would put it quite that way is a matter for interesting conjecture.